Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) had reportedly already tried a similar angle with Raffensperger, seeming to suggest it might be possible to toss ballots from counties with higher rates of signature disparities. Each of these efforts to invalidate votes reminded me of the angry words of one frustrated man separated from me by a plexiglass barrier while I was working as a volunteer election judge in Lombard, Ill., at the end of October:
“What I think you should do is look at my ID and see that I am who I say I am.”
My job that day was to take voters’ basic information, verify that the signature they provided matched the one the county had on file, and program the access cards each voter inserted into the machine. My fellow election judge and I had decided that the signature this man had provided wasn’t a close enough match to the one we had on file. He was holding his driver’s license in his right hand, the strongest possible proof of his identity. It made no sense to him that I was squinting at his hastily rendered signature instead of his government-issued photo ID.
I attempted to explain what might happen to the electronically captured image of his signature after his vote was cast. The machine beside me would print a copy of it, which would go into a box by my elbow and eventually be returned to the county election division. If someone on a politician’s team pulled it out later and didn’t consider it a match, the party this man was registered to could lose a vote. His driver’s license would be no help in that scenario.
“I want to make sure that doesn’t happen,” I said, “and I believe you are who you say you are.”
He wasn’t alone in this frustrating experience. Some of the voters whose signatures I evaluated did indeed provide different signatures than they had used when they registered to vote — often years before. But that did not mean they were not whom they said they were. The poll pad is actually very difficult to sign. It’s basically just a mounted iPad with a fat, squishy-ended stylus attached by a string. Many on-file signatures were originally rendered with a ballpoint pen on a piece of paper, which makes for an inherent disparity. And voters who struggled — whether for that reason or another — needed the election judges to help make sure there was no way anyone could throw out their vote. We could ask them to try again, or we could recapture their signature so the one on file would match their current signing capabilities.
I had no way of knowing to which party any of the voters with whom I worked belonged and I didn’t care. My one aim as a judge was to ensure that as many people could vote safely during the pandemic as possible. In pursuit of this goal, I had to ask many people to re-sign on the poll pad throughout early voting. Some of them simply signed too quickly the first time. Others had diseases such as multiple sclerosis that had affected their motor skills in significant ways. I processed one voter in a wheelchair who’d had fingers amputated since he’d last provided his signature. Usually, if we rotated the poll pad until it was horizontal and held onto the base, people could provide a matching signature. If that didn’t work, we could look at their ID and then recapture their new signature.
The 2020 general election was my first as a judge, and it was a strange moment to begin. We wore face shields and purple latex gloves and handed each person a Q-tip with which to vote so they wouldn’t have to touch the screen of the machine. There was hand sanitizer all over the floor.
But the coronavirus was also the very reason I’d applied to be a judge in the first place. According to the Pew Research Center, 58 percent of election judges in the 2018 general election were over 60, and more than a quarter were over 70. At the time I applied to judge the election, I wasn’t aware of this specific statistic, but I’d noticed that most everyone working at my polling place had gray hair and worked elections because they were retired. At 34, I had a much lower risk of developing complications from a coronavirus infection than the people in this age group, and I figured it was time to step up.
Every single person who worked at a polling place during Georgia’s special election took a risk, much more so if they belong to the typical age demographic for election judges. But the past year has taught us, over and over, how little we can really take for granted. This incredible system we have built doesn’t work on its own. We must take the necessary risks to ensure that it functions, and the more of us there are working as election judges and ballot counters, comparing signatures, entering data so that voters can cure rejected ballots and cast them again, the harder it will be to manipulate.
That angry man whose first signature I rejected did sign again, and the second time the match was clear. My fellow judge and I placed our initials below his signature, and I handed him his access card. If we hadn’t scrutinized his signature carefully, if we’d signed off on that first, scribbled one, no voter fraud would have ensued. He was who he said he was, after all. But someone, if they’d wanted to, could have found a reason to invalidate his vote. Someone could have even attempted to use it to invalidate other people’s votes, too, as the past two months have shown us. The careful work of election judges and ballot counters protects us, and it’s vital to the health of democracy. It’s worth doing and doing well, even in the midst of a global pandemic.
